Therefore,
if Americans want a stable and prosperous economy, they want a free
economy (that is, one based on the free market). If Americans want a
free economy, they want “a free State”, that being the only
kind of political system that will support and defend the free market.
And if Americans want “a free State”, they want “[a]
well regulated Militia” in every State. Moreover, for all of these
reasons, the members of the Armed Forces—all of whom take an oath
or affirmation to support the Constitution—should support “[a]
well regulated Militia” in every State, too.

If
each or even most of the States already had “[a] well regulated
Militia” in place, Americans would not now be faced with the likelihood
of uncontrollable violent social unrest arising out of a nationwide
economic collapse. For, not only would Americans be trained and equipped
to deal with economic shocks and concomitant social disruptions, but
also they would have put into effect proper institutions to prevent
or lessen the severity of such shocks—in particular, an alternative
sound currency that would enable them to operate outside of the Federal
Reserve System.

So
it is certainly possible that, as the economic crisis intensifies and
its true genesis becomes widely known, people throughout the States
will prevail upon their State legislators to revitalize their Militia—first,
to forestall, or if necessary to contain, violent social unrest within
their jurisdictions; second, to provide alternative economic institutions,
and in particular an alternative currency, in order to stabilize their
local economies; and third, to assert other aspects of State sovereignty
under the aegis of the Second, Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments
to the Constitution.

These
reforms will not be self-executing, however. To be put into place they
will require a great deal of effort from people in every walk of life
and at every level of American society. Thus, even more pertinent today
than they were in his day are Benjamin Franklin’s words of warning:
“We must all hang together, or we shall all surely hang separately.”

In
this process the middle class must play a decisive role, in its members’
own personal interests as well as in their country’s interest.
Wealthy people worried simply about the likelihood and sequence of hyperinflation,
depression, or hyperinflation coupled with depression in America—and
about how they might be able to protect their own businesses, incomes,
and accumulated wealth under such circumstances by this or that economic
“hedge”—are viewing their world through rather ill-fitting
rose-colored glasses. The rules for successful entrepreneurship, prudent
investing, and the retention of accumulated wealth, after all, are as
much political as they are economic. Ultimately, these rules
are grounded in constitutional law. Change the political rules
to a significant degree, and even the best-laid economic plans, worked
out under the false assumption that the original political rules will
always continue in operation, will prove worthless. And when hyperinflation,
depression, or other economic calamities strike, if the Armed Forces
are politicized as instruments of domestic repression, then the political
rules familiar today will no longer be operative.

Moreover,
in the new political environment, merely continuing his business in
operation, maintaining his income, and securing his accumulated wealth
will become matters of low priority for anyone with high economic, social,
or political visibility who has or might run afoul of the new regime.

So
those myopic investors and entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out
how they can personally profit to the maximum degree from, or even how
they can just continue to do business with some modicum of success during,
the coming collapse of America’s economy—under the childish
illusion that the political rules will always remain favorable to their
doing so—had better start thinking instead of how they can contribute,
in every way they can, to whatever efforts their fellow citizens are
making to prevent that collapse, to fend off the para-militarized
national police state that collapse will turn loose, and to return this
country to the rule of constitutional law. Right now, before time runs
out.

Once
again, History provides the example. On the night of the 9th of June,
1772, under the leadership of John Brown, one of Rhode Island’s
“first and most respectable merchants”, a contingent of
patriots set out from Sabin’s Tavern in Providence to attack the
British Navy’s schooner Gaspee after she had run aground
on the sand spit at Namquit Point. Rowing down Narragansett Bay in whaleboats,
they boarded and captured “that troublesome vessel”, then
burned her to the waterline in protest against her captain’s heavy-handed
enforcement of the Mother Country’s revenue laws. [9]

Advertisement

By
September of 1772, an outraged King George III had offered huge rewards
“[f]or the discovering and apprehending the persons who plundered
and burnt the Gaspee schooner”; had promised full pardons to any
accomplices who informed on the main perpetrators; had determined that
“the persons concerned in * * * that daring insult, should
be brought to England, to be tried”; and had established
a Commission of Inquiry “to the end that [suspects] may be accordingly
arrested and delivered to the custody of the commander of [the British]
ships and vessels in North America”.[10] But no one betrayed John
Brown or any of the other patriots.

Not
surprisingly, Rhode Islanders immediately denounced as the very zenith
of tyranny the claim of the Crown to ship Americans to England to be
tried. On the other side, the loyalist Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas
Hutchinson, recognized that

[p]eople
in this Province [that is, Massachusetts], both friends and enemies
to government, are in great expectation from the late affair at Rhode
Island, of the burning the King’s schooner; and they consider
the matter in which the news of it will be received in England, and
the measures to be taken, as decisive. If it is passed over without
a full inquiry and due resentment, our liberty people will think they
may with impunity commit any acts of violence, be they ever so atrocious,
and the friends to government will despond and give up all hopes of
being able to withstand the faction. [11]

Admiral
Montague says that Lord Sandwich will never leave pursuing the colony
[of Rhode Island], until it is disfranchised. If [the Gaspee incident]
is passed over, the other colonies will follow the example. [12]

Although
widely and rightly denounced as “Too infamous to have a friend,
Too bad for bad men to commend”,[13] Lord Sandwich, First Lord
of the Admiralty, was correct on this score.
Yet although they had brought it upon themselves, Rhode Islanders did
not stand alone in this crisis. On the 12th of March, 1773, Virginia’s
House of Burgesses appointed “a standing committee of inquiry”—the
members of which included such outstanding patriots as Peyton Randolph,
Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson—

whose
business it shall be, to obtain the most early and authentic intelligence
of all such acts and resolutions of the British Parliament, or proceedings
of the administration, as may relate to, or affect the British colonies
in America; and to keep up and maintain a correspondence and communication
with our sister colonies, respecting these important considerations[.]

In
particular, the committee was instructed,

without
delay, [to] inform themselves * * * of the principles and authority,
on which was constituted a court of inquiry * * * in Rhode Island, with
powers to transport persons suspected of offences committed in America,
to places beyond the seas, to be tried.

And
the House of Burgesses requested “the different Assemblies of
the British colonies * * * to appoint some person or persons * * * to
communicate from time to time, with the * * * committee”. [14]

In
response to this request, beginning with Rhode Island, all of the Colonies
then established Committees of Correspondence, the work of which aroused
and unified Americans in opposition to Britain’s suppression of
their liberties.[15] Indeed, the Committees of Correspondence were of
critical importance in the formation of the Continental Congress. [16]

Well,
now, just who was this “John Brown” of Providence, Rhode
Island, who ignited the Gaspee affair, and with its flames
set afire one of the brightest torches lighting the way towards America’s
War of Independence? After John Hancock of Boston, Massachusetts, Brown
was probably the wealthiest man in New England, whose family fortune
later endowed Brown University, in Providence. For his part in burning
the Gaspee, though, Brown could have been convicted of treason
and piracy—the punishments for which, if his ignominious death
on the scaffold had not been enough, would have included the forfeiture
of all his worldly goods to the Crown. (Hancock, too, would have stood
in the shadow of the public executioner to pay the supreme penalty for
his own acts of treason against Great Britain, had Major John Pitcairn
and his Redcoats apprehended him in Lexington on the 19th of April in
1775.)

Although
a shrewd merchant, John Brown did not organize the attack on the Gaspee
because it was a good profit-making venture, a sound economic investment,
or a clever hedge against inflation or depression. Neither did he mount
the attack to curry favor from the political Establishment. To the contrary:
From the moment he gathered his fellow patriots at Sabin’s Tavern,
he stood to lose everything, including his life. His participation in
the Gaspee affair was the riskiest speculation he had ever
made or would ever make—under the circumstances, at least supremely
reckless, in the view of the world perhaps insane. He was, after all,
spitting in the eye of the entire British Empire, the supremely puissant
“New World Order” of his day. Yet he—along with John
Hancock, George Washington, and many other rich and influential Americans
who wagered their all in the forefront of the fight for liberty—was
eventually victorious!

So
it is not impossible for the well-to-do to be clear-sighted, courageous,
patriotic, and even self-sacrificing. Or at least it was not impossible
then, although apparently it is very difficult these days. It should
not, however, be too difficult, even today. For unlike John
Brown, who in the comfort of his rich surroundings had nothing material
to lose if he and his fellow Americans had simply sat down quietly under
British rule, the wealthy among the middle class today have everything
to lose if patriotic Americans—especially including themselves—do
not stand up, muster their financial and other resources, and bring
an end to the Federal Reserve System and the emerging national para-military
police state.

Subscribe
to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts!

Enter
Your E-Mail Address:

Because
the Federal Reserve System will destroy the economy; and the para-military
police state will clamp down on society in the aftermath of
financial collapse; and then those who have wealth that can be stolen
by political looters will have it stolen. Perhaps not as soon
as tomorrow. But too soon for comfort.

1-
Nicholas Fraser & Marysa Navarro, Evita: The Real Life of Evita
Perón (New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996),
at 772-Quoted in Robert D. Crassweller, Perón
and the Enigmas of Argentina (New York, New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1987) at 813- U.S. Const. art. VI, cl. 34- The underlying incident was the infamous beating
of one Rodney King by four LAPD officers, an horrific videotape of which
was aired repeatedly throughout the country. 5- Pages 32-336- Knox v. Lee, 79 U.S. (12 Wallace) 457 (1871).7- U.S. Const. art. I, § 10, cl. 1.8-E.g., Lane County v. Oregon, 74 U.S. (7
Wallace) 71 (1869); Hagar v. Reclamation District No. 108, 111 U.S.
701 (1884).9- See THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GASPEE, in John
R. Bartlett, Editor, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence
Plantations (Providence, Rhode Island: A. Crawford Greene, 1862),
Volume VII, at 57-19210-Id. at 107-108, 104, 111.11-Id. at 102.12-Id. at 103.13-Quoted in The American Heritage Book of the
Revolution (New York, New York: American Heritage Publishing Co.,
Inc., 1958), at 276.14- J.R. Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode
Island, Volume VII, at 226-22715-See id. at 227-23916- See David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American
Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, Virginia:
University Press of Virginia, 1974), at 20-23.

Edwin Vieira, Jr., holds four
degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School).

For more than thirty years he has
practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme
Court of the United States he successfully argued or briefed the cases
leading to the landmark decisions Abood v. Detroit Board of Education,
Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America
v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations on
the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public sectors,
may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition of their
employment.

He has written numerous monographs
and articles in scholarly journals, and lectured throughout the county.
His most recent work on money and banking is the two-volume Pieces
of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States
Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study in existence of American
monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective. www.piecesofeight.us

He is also the co-author (under
a nom de plume) of the political novel CRA$HMAKER:
A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered crash
of the Federal Reserve System, and the political upheaval it causes. www.crashmaker.com

Because the Federal
Reserve System will destroy the economy; and the para-military
police state will clamp down on society in the aftermath of financial
collapse; and then those who have wealth that can be stolen by political
looters will have it stolen. Perhaps not as soon as tomorrow.
But too soon for comfort.